On job titles

When I was twenty-two, I wanted to be called CEO so badly that I would rehearse saying it under my breath on the walk to the bus stop. “Chief Executive Officer.” The words had weight in my mouth. They sounded like a coat of arms.

I got there. I held the title at hedgehog lab for nineteen years. I stepped down in December. And somewhere in the last few years of that run, well before I left, I noticed something I had spent two decades not letting myself notice. The badge had welded itself to my sense of self quietly enough that I had stopped seeing the join. The title was doing identity work for me, and I had not done the work to separate the two.

the badge was always borrowed

The CEO title is not very old. The acronym was first attested in Australia in 1914 and only made it into American business writing about sixty years later. Before that, the apex job in an American company was usually called President. In Britain we used Managing Director, and most of the Commonwealth followed. CEO is the upstart, dressed up with enough Latinate machinery that it can sound like it has been around since the East India Company.

It has not. It is roughly the same age as the personal computer in the American business imagination. The Americans borrowed it from Australia, gave it gravity, and then forgot they had borrowed it.

The lore came later. The Jobs-era worship of the founder-as-visionary, the Wall Street myth of the turnaround chief, the cult of the keynote operator in a black turtleneck. By the time I was reading Fast Company in my early twenties, CEO had become the only title in the language that meant anything to me. Everything else was a stepping stone. The job was not the work. The job was the word.

the work, not the rank

Walk through Anthropic’s headcount and you will find people whose previous titles read like a startup graveyard. Peter Bailis was CTO at Workday until March. He is now a Member of Technical Staff. Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, was Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer until January. He moved sideways into Anthropic Labs as a Member of Technical Staff. Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com, joined on the same flat ticket.

MTS is a Bell Labs convention, adopted by Xerox PARC and the research labs that followed. It was designed to refuse the bucketing of people into researchers and engineers, and the deeper refusal was to stop pretending that an org chart was a description of contribution. Anthropic has gone further and made it the default for almost everyone. There is no apex title to chase. The badge is the work.

This is not virtue signalling. It is a design choice with a thesis behind it. If you put CTO on someone, you have just told everyone in the room how to hear them. The work after that has to win against the title. If you put MTS on someone, the work has to speak for itself, and so does everyone else’s. The signal is quieter. The room listens differently.

I think this is the direction the next decade of organisation design is travelling, and most of us will get there about ten years after Anthropic does.

what about the rest of us

I want to be careful here. There is a confident argument going round, most clearly made by Philip Su in January, that the individual contributor role is dead. Su’s version is that everyone in software is becoming a manager of a fleet of AI agents. I think Su is right about software engineers, and I think the wider claim does not generalise. Most work is not a fleet of coding agents. Most work is judgement, taste, relationships, decisions, and the slow accumulation of context that does not come out of a model. The badge on the office door does not predict any of it.

The reframe I would offer is simpler. Titles should describe what you do. Engineer. Builder. Member of technical staff. Growth. Operator. They should not describe how many people sit on the other side of a one-on-one from you.

That is the change. The hierarchical title, the Director of, the Head of, the VP of, the Chief of, is becoming a Companies House artefact rather than a description of work. Someone has to be on the signature line for legal and fiduciary reasons. Almost everything else about the title is a custom of the trade that we could quietly retire.

the manager question

This is the part where the post could go bad if I am not careful.

People management exists as a job today because someone needs to do performance reviews, hold one-on-ones, set objectives, hire, fire, and carry the political water for the team. Strip out the hierarchical scaffolding and those functions do not vanish. They redistribute. The question is whether they belong in one person whose entire job is being a manager, or whether they are a craft that everyone above a certain experience level practises in service of the work.

I think it is the second one. Before I go further I want to engage with the strongest case against me.

Jo Freeman wrote “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” in 1970 and she is still right. Strip out the formal hierarchy of a group and you do not get an absence of hierarchy. You get an informal one, usually run by whoever is loudest, longest-serving, or closest to the founder. The flat org is often the most political org in the building, because nobody can name where the power is sitting.

Gallup’s research is the other hard one. They have a stat that gets quoted a lot: managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. If the broad shape of that is right, and I think it is, then the person who runs your one-on-ones is the single biggest lever on your experience of work. That is an argument for taking management seriously, not for collapsing it.

So here is what I actually think, and I am going to try to hold both halves at once.

Management is a craft. It is real work, it takes years to get good at, and a company without people who practise it well will eat itself. Camille Fournier and Julie Zhuo have both written books worth reading on this, and Andy Grove wrote the one everyone else is footnoting. None of that goes away.

People management as a job in itself, sitting on top of a column of reporting lines, drawing salary primarily from the act of being above other people on a chart, is the part I think dies. The craft survives. The career path dies.

In the org I am sketching, accountability runs through commitments rather than reporting lines. Morning Star, a tomato processor with around seven hundred million dollars in revenue and no managers, has been running this way since the 1970s with Colleague Letters of Understanding. Adults write contracts with the adults whose work depends on theirs. They keep them. They renegotiate them when the work changes. It is not exotic. It is what professional life looked like before HR invented the modern reporting line.

I am not arguing for a flat structure. I am arguing for a culture where the most senior people in the room carry the most accountability, and where accountability is mostly horizontal. Sometimes the person you owe an answer to today is not the person on your org chart, and that should not feel weird. It should feel like the work.

what the badge cost me

Back to the personal, because the abstract argument is the easy half.

For most of my time as a CEO, I would not have admitted that the title was doing identity work for me. I was good at the work itself and I told myself the rest was just plumbing. But every time someone introduced me at a conference and the room sat up half an inch straighter, I felt the badge tighten. Every time a younger founder asked me a question with the slight deference reserved for the suffix, the badge tightened a bit more. By the end of nineteen years I was carrying a coat of arms I had welded to my chest, and the welding had happened quietly enough that I did not notice it until I tried to take the thing off.

That is the part I would tell my twenty-two-year-old self. Not that the title is bad. The title was a useful thing to hold for the work I was doing. But the longer you hold one, the more it tries to become you, and the work of separating the two is a job you have to do consciously or you will wake up at forty-nine wondering who you are without it.

what I am building from here

I am writing this post in part because I am still doing that separating, and because the cultural infrastructure of work is changing underneath us. Most of us will not notice until our own badges feel loose.

The other reason I am writing it is that the next things I build, I am going to build differently. The hierarchy, the leadership, the structure. None of it should look like the last twenty years. I do not have all of it worked out yet, and the honest answer is that I will figure most of it out by doing. But the principles are already clear to me. Titles should describe work. Management is a craft, practised by experienced people, never a separate profession. Accountability runs through commitments instead of reporting lines. The most senior people in the room carry the most weight, and they earn that weight every day instead of borrowing it from a job title.

I would like the next decade of my work to be described in verbs, not nouns. Build, chair, advise, write. If someone has to put a Companies House title on a form somewhere, that is fine. It will not be the thing I rehearse on the way to the bus stop.